I think it would be better to connect the CD drive to the add-on controller and the SD-to-IDE adapter to the onboard controller. The ISA bus is really quite slow...

There are also 3.5" drive bays for IDE-SD/CF adapters.

Pentium 70? That never existed. Sounds like either Pentium 60 or 75.

If it's a Pentium 60, the 'silly reason' it only came with one IDE port was that is used the Intel i430LX chipset which only features one IDE channel...

Anyway, compatibility with old junk depends mainly on PCI version. For that we need to know exactly which chipset is in that machine. BIOS isn't relevant as the IDE controllers have their own BIOS (at least, the PCI add-in kind I'm talking about). If you could run eg. a Promise ATA-66 controller it would be much faster than the onboard IDE. That said, this is still an ancient 1st/2nd gen Pentium and will generally be CPU-limited anyway, so not really worth it.

Alternative is an ISA IDE controller that can run as secondary (not common, but they certainly exist). As pointed out, they aren't going to improve performance, so don't use for the SD.

Tbh though there's a much better solution that is period-appropriate: get a sound card with IDE on it, use that for the CDRom and run your SD adaptor of the onboard IDE.

You can always just connect the optical drives to an ISA sound card.

Wolfus wrote:

There are also 3.5" drive bays for IDE-SD/CF adapters.

The disk drive is too far away as well sadly - and I only have one 3.5 bay which I need for the floppy drive.

And yeah it's a Pentium 75 - typo. But I found the manual and it says there is a 32 bit PCI slot. I assume PCI controllers ARE fast enough?

red_avatar wrote:

Wolfus wrote:

There are also 3.5" drive bays for IDE-SD/CF adapters.

The disk drive is too far away as well sadly - and I only have one 3.5 bay which I need for the floppy drive.

And yeah it's a Pentium 75 - typo. But I found the manual and it says there is a 32 bit PCI slot. I assume PCI controllers ARE fast enough?

Fast enough: sure. 32b 33MHz PCI is 32b 33MHz PCI when it comes to that. But there's a big difference between PCI 1.0, PCI 2.0 and PCI 2.1, particularly regarding bus mastering. Again, to say anything about compatibility, we need to know your motherboard chipset.

dionb wrote:

If it's a Pentium 60, the 'silly reason' it only came with one IDE port was that is used the Intel i430LX chipset which only features one IDE channel...

Is this really so? As far as I remember, i430LX SIO (82378IB/ZB) didn't have an integrated IDE controller.

dionb wrote:

red_avatar wrote:

Wolfus wrote:

There are also 3.5" drive bays for IDE-SD/CF adapters.

The disk drive is too far away as well sadly - and I only have one 3.5 bay which I need for the floppy drive.

And yeah it's a Pentium 75 - typo. But I found the manual and it says there is a 32 bit PCI slot. I assume PCI controllers ARE fast enough?

Fast enough: sure. 32b 33MHz PCI is 32b 33MHz PCI when it comes to that. But there's a big difference between PCI 1.0, PCI 2.0 and PCI 2.1, particularly regarding bus mastering. Again, to say anything about compatibility, we need to know your motherboard chipset.

I found no info so I opened up my PC to manually check - took out the sound card since it was blocking the view of everything and ... there's no PCI slots 😢 . Seems it's the version released after this one (same CPU) that had PCI.

But if I can indeed connect the CD drive to my sound card then it should indeed free up an IDE slot. Of course, the sound card is ALSO connected to ISA so I assume the CD drive will be reading slower?

red_avatar wrote:

[...]

I found no info so I opened up my PC to manually check - took out the sound card since it was blocking the view of everything and ... there's no PCI slots 😢 . Seems it's the version released after this one (same CPU) that had PCI.

No PCI at all? That's odd for any Pentium-class system. Sure there aren't a few hidden on the other side of the riser? If not, are you sure of the identification. A couple of pics might let us help here too.

But if I can indeed connect the CD drive to my sound card then it should indeed free up an IDE slot. Of course, the sound card is ALSO connected to ISA so I assume the CD drive will be reading slower?

Depends...

It would really help if you could pro-actively give us more information to go on.
- which sound card do you have now? Does it have a 40p IDE header?
- which CD-Rom drive do you have?

Consider that "1x" in CDRom terms is 150kB/s. and 16b ISA does about 8MB/s under ideal circumstances. You could theoretically get maximum performance out of a 50x CDRom drive without saturating the ISA bus. In practice you're not going to be able to get 8MB/s over an ISA bus used by multiple peripherals with interrupts and DMA, but up to 8x CDRom I wouldn't expect to see any performance differences between ISA and PCI controllers.

No PCI at all? That's odd for any Pentium-class system

Probably based on that horrible OPTi chipset.

I am using a promise S150 TX2Plus PCI card on a intel 430NX motherboard /P90 and it works in DOS/Windows. It is vastly faster than the onboard ide (PIO 3). I run a cheap 128GB SSD off it and get around 45MB/S in DOS (promise bios extensions rom flashes up 'DMA MODE 5' before dos loads.
430LX is a year older but also supports PCI 2.0 so it should work on that if you have PCI slots.

dionb wrote:

No PCI at all? That's odd for any Pentium-class system. Sure there aren't a few hidden on the other side of the riser? If not, are you sure of the identification. A couple of pics might let us help here too.

Nope. This is a VERY early Pentium. Remember I said it was a very expensive PC at the time? This one was bought in the first half of 1995 and cost over €2000 which is about €3500 today. The Pentium 75 chip had just been on the market for less than half a year at that time. My father's girlfriend (who was pretty wealthy) bought it for her son. The model number is HP Vectra VE 5/75.

Funny thing is: it was almost immediately obsolete due to Windows 95 appearing shortly after and it came with only 4MB of RAM and a 270MB drive so it might have had a good CPU for the time, it was really limited by everything else. I upgraded the memory to 16MB, replaced the 4 speed CD drive with a Pioneer tray-less DVD drive (works beautifully!) and replaced the noisy hard drive with a IDE-to-SD board and now it's a very good DOS machine - 2GB per card is not much though, because even tiny files take up a lot of space due to how FAT16 works.

I found an older manual of the first version and indeed: no PCI:
Two full-length 16-bit ISA
Two half-length 16-bit ISA

The version released half a year later had a PCI slot AND a PCI/ISA hybrid slot:
One 32-bit PCI1
One 32-bit PCI1 / full-length 16-bit ISA Combination
One full-length 16-bit ISA
One HP Proprietary (160 mm/6.3 inches) 16-bit ISA

Oddly enough, the graphics card is on-board and IS PCI:
Integrated 32-bit Ultra VGA on PCI
bus (Cirrus Logic 5430)

I'd show pictures but I just put everything back together and getting the cables tidy is a pain in the ass. If there's one thing I hate about old PCs, it's the IDE ribbon cables.

Depends... […]
Show full quote

Depends...

It would really help if you could pro-actively give us more information to go on.
- which sound card do you have now? Does it have a 40p IDE header?
- which CD-Rom drive do you have?

Consider that "1x" in CDRom terms is 150kB/s. and 16b ISA does about 8MB/s under ideal circumstances. You could theoretically get maximum performance out of a 50x CDRom drive without saturating the ISA bus. In practice you're not going to be able to get 8MB/s over an ISA bus used by multiple peripherals with interrupts and DMA, but up to 8x CDRom I wouldn't expect to see any performance differences between ISA and PCI controllers.

I gave up on the sound card idea. I hooked up every potentially compatible drive I had, and none would get detected. I did get one drive to half work (it read DVDs, just didn't get the driver to work) and I heard a lot of extra noise on the line while it was reading which I absolutely don't want so I'm going to just give up for now and just open the case to swap the card if needed. The case opens in seconds anyway - HP sure knew how to design their PC cases.

red_avatar wrote:

[...]

Nope. This is a VERY early Pentium. Remember I said it was a very expensive PC at the time? This one was bought in the first half of 1995 and cost over €2000 which is about €3500 today. The Pentium 75 chip had just been on the market for less than half a year at that time. My father's girlfriend (who was pretty wealthy) bought it for her son. The model number is HP Vectra VE 5/75.

VERY early Pentium systems were from 1993. I bought my first, a somewhat dated (i.e. very much 1994-vintage) P60 in January 1995 for less than EUR 1000 in 1995 money (about EUR 1400 today) and that had 3 PCI slots. This system isn't that old. A 1995 system is from 2 years after Intel started pushing PCI as hard as they could. No 1995-vintage chipset failed to support it.

Funny thing is: it was almost immediately obsolete due to Windows 95 appearing shortly after and it came with only 4MB of RAM and a 270MB drive so it might have had a good CPU for the time, it was really limited by everything else.

4MB on a Pentium machine in 1995? And for that price...?? Again, I bought a bargain basement PC around the same time and still had 8MB. Which was also far too little, so in 1996 I upgraded to 16MB for a LOT of money. 2 months later RAM prices had halved 😦

upgraded the memory to 16MB, replaced the 4 speed CD drive with a Pioneer tray-less DVD drive (works beautifully!) and replaced the noisy hard drive with a IDE-to-SD board and now it's a very good DOS machine - 2GB per card is not much though, because even tiny files take up a lot of space due to how FAT16 works.

You can try DOS 7.1, that can handle FAT32 partitions - if the system BIOS can handle bigger drives than 2GB at least.

I found an older manual of the first version and indeed: no PCI: Two full-length 16-bit ISA Two half-length 16-bit ISA […]
Show full quote

I found an older manual of the first version and indeed: no PCI:
Two full-length 16-bit ISA
Two half-length 16-bit ISA

The version released half a year later had a PCI slot AND a PCI/ISA hybrid slot:
One 32-bit PCI1
One 32-bit PCI1 / full-length 16-bit ISA Combination
One full-length 16-bit ISA
One HP Proprietary (160 mm/6.3 inches) 16-bit ISA

Oddly enough, the graphics card is on-board and IS PCI:
Integrated 32-bit Ultra VGA on PCI
bus (Cirrus Logic 5430)

Nothing odd about it. HP used chipsets which supported PCI from the very first i430LX and Pentium 60 in 1993. Even if there's no PCI on the riser, that's a PCI system all right.

I'd show pictures but I just put everything back together and getting the cables tidy is a pain in the ass. If there's one thing I hate about old PCs, it's the IDE ribbon cables.

[...]

I gave up on the sound card idea. I hooked up every potentially compatible drive I had, and none would get detected. I did get one drive to half work (it read DVDs, just didn't get the driver to work) and I heard a lot of extra noise on the line while it was reading which I absolutely don't want so I'm going to just give up for now and just open the case to swap the card if needed. The case opens in seconds anyway - HP sure knew how to design their PC cases.

What do you mean "detected"? You're talking about a DOS system, which is not a plug'n'play environment. You need to use a specific DOS driver for that card (or rather: its IDE chip) in CONFIG.SYS. Then you call that from MSCDEX.EXE (or equivalent) in AUTOEXEC.BAT. Again, I'd happily help, but you still aren't giving any information to go by.

Sounds like a rip-off on local sales level. Pentium 75 is a entry-level CPU from 1994 after all.

Maybe entry-level for a Pentium class machine, but not many people could afford one of those in 1994....

Sounds to me like you need an IDE extension cable:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/IDE-40-Pin-Male-to-F … rd/193032835224

Either that or you can get some ribbon cable and some connectors and make yourself a custom IDE cable to suit your needs.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Sounds like a rip-off on local sales level. Pentium 75 is a entry-level CPU from 1994 after all.

Entry level Pentium, not entry level CPU for 1994. That would have been a 486-33.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Sounds like a rip-off on local sales level. Pentium 75 is a entry-level CPU from 1994 after all.

Entry level Pentium, not entry level CPU for 1994. That would have been a 486-33.

Exactly - any Pentium in 1994/early 1995 would have been a high-end option, which makes the very low specs of this machine puzzling to say the least.

dionb wrote:

VERY early Pentium systems were from 1993. I bought my first, a somewhat dated (i.e. very much 1994-vintage) P60 in January 1995 for less than EUR 1000 in 1995 money (about EUR 1400 today) and that had 3 PCI slots. This system isn't that old. A 1995 system is from 2 years after Intel started pushing PCI as hard as they could. No 1995-vintage chipset failed to support it.

Sure, there was the 1993 P5 line of Pentiums but from what I recall, they weren't even available in stores around here because they were not considered "consumer grade" and way too expensive which is why I wasn't really including them. For the public and games magazines, those Pentiums were the stuff of legend and no-one owned them.

Also, off-brand PCs supported PCI sooner than big brands (for PCI slots that is) which is why I'm not surprised this PC has none. HP took another year for Series 2 (which I confused mine with since they look identical) to have PCI ports. IBM was no different - the Aptiva on sale in 1995 did NOT have PCI. Don't ask me why but big brands always were a cycle behind on modern hardware. Probably to make sure it was reliable and to make their custom hardware work as best as possible. And

dionb wrote:

4MB on a Pentium machine in 1995? And for that price...?? Again, I bought a bargain basement PC around the same time and still had 8MB. Which was also far too little, so in 1996 I upgraded to 16MB for a LOT of money. 2 months later RAM prices had halved

I recall VERY well that those were the "normal" prices in Europe and the UK - ESPECIALLY for brands like HP and IBM. I was subscribed to PC Gamer (UK) and always looked at those prices with envy. For a laugh I took a few magazines from May 1995 and here's the prices:

Store1: No-brand Pentium 60 with 8Mb of memory, 2x CD drive, Sound Blaster Pro, 420MB hard drive+: €2500
Store2: No-brand Pentium 60 with 4Mb of memory, barebones (no drive, no monitor, no keyboard or mouse, no sound card, etc.): €1200. If you add the monitor (€350), drive (€250), sound card (€120), CD drive (€160) and mouse/keyboard (€70) you come to over €2000 as well and still don't have any software and reliability of the hardware is unknown.

The HP was a Pentium 70 with 4MB of memory, a 4x CD drive, a Sound Blaster 16 (one of the best versions too) and a 15" monitor that was really good. The hard drive was small for the time though.

So no, the price wasn't insanely high, it was just dumb to buy a PC right there and then. Wait half a year and for that price you could get a Pentium 133 and 16MB of RAM. Windows 95 was known to require more memory and memory prices at the time were insane with 16MB costing €400 easily. During the Summer of 1996 I bought a no-brand Pentium 166 MMX with 16MB of RAM for €1500 to give you an idea - it was a crap PC though - had a crappy Aztech soundcard that didn't like DirectX 5 games (crashed the entire PC) and the PSU blew up after a few years (cheap crap) - that's what you got with no-brand computers sadly.

dionb wrote:

What do you mean "detected"? You're talking about a DOS system, which is not a plug'n'play environment. You need to use a specific DOS driver for that card (or rather: its IDE chip) in CONFIG.SYS. Then you call that from MSCDEX.EXE (or equivalent) in AUTOEXEC.BAT. Again, I'd happily help, but you still aren't giving any information to go by.

I've known that stuff for 25 years but if it fails to see the drive when you load the driver, there's not much else you can do. The others wouldn't even behave properly and would make weird sounds which is not a good sign. The Sound Blaster 16 is not exactly known for perfect compatibility with all CD drives and I don't intend to take a gamble and order 25 year old CD drives that may or may not work let alone work with the Sound Blaster 16 just to solve a problem that's not a huge deal anyway.